Virus whistleblower alleges ongoing retaliation

A US government whistleblower ousted from a leading role in battling Covid-19 alleged yesterday that the Trump administration has intensified its campaign to punish him for revealing shortcomings in the US response.

Dr Rick Bright, former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, said in an amended complaint filed with a federal watchdog agency that he has been relegated to a lesser role in his new assignment at the National Institutes of Health, unable to lend his full expertise to the battle against Covid-19.

The complaint also said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar is leading a “co-ordinated effort” to undermine Bright in his new duties, and that has led to former colleagues shunning him.

The pressure is coming straight from the top, the complaint said, with President Donald Trump calling Bright an “angry, disgruntled employee” and setting the tone for a campaign of “public disparagement” to “unnerve and intimidate” the whistleblower.

Bright, a vaccine expert, was supposed to be working on virus diagnostic tests in his new job at NIH, but he “is cut off from all vaccine work, cut off from all therapeutic work, and has a limited role in the diagnostic work”, said the complaint.

Where Bright previously oversaw 200 hundred or more projects at BARDA, he’s now been given responsibility for five to eight projects, involving diagnostic tests already approved by the FDA.

In his initial complaint filed last month, Bright said the final straw for his bosses seemed to come when he resisted efforts to flood the New York area with hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug once touted by Trump as a “game changer” for Covid-19.

The Food and Drug Administration recently revoked its emergency use approval for the malaria drug’s use on Covid-19 patients, citing known heart risks and unproven benefits against the virus.